“Oh yeah.”
“I’m sure they’ll love your office,” Susan said.
And they did, for brief stretches. Every hour or so they felt the need to be walked down to the Public Garden. In between walks they sat, usually in a semicircle, and looked at me expectantly, with their mouths open and their tongues hanging out. All day. Outside, Christmas was making its implacable approach. The dryness in the mouth of merchandising managers was intensifying, the exhaustion had become bone deep in the parents of small children, the television stations kept wishing me the best of the joyous season every station break, and the street gangs in Roxbury and Dorchester were shooting each other over insults to their manhood at the rate of about three a week. In the stores downtown people jostled each other; bundled uncomfortably in clothing against the cold, they were hot and angry in the crowded aisles where people sold silk show handkerchiefs and imported fragrances for the special person in your life. Liquor stores were doing a land-office business, and the courts were in double session trying to clear the calendar for the holiday break.
I got up and went to the old wood file cabinet behind the door and got out a bottle of Glenfiddich that Rachel Wallace had delivered to me last Christmas. It was still half full. I poured about two ounces in the water glass and went back to my desk. I sipped a little and let it vaporize in my mouth. Outside my window the dark winter afternoon had merged into the early darkness of a winter evening. I sipped another taste of the scotch. I raised my glass toward the dogs.
“Fa la la la la,” I said.
I could feel the single-malt scotch inch into my veins. I sipped another sip. In my desk was a letter from Paul Giacomin in Aix-en-Provence in France. I took it out and read it again. Then I put it back into the envelope and put the envelope back in my desk drawer. I swiveled my chair so I could put my feet on the window sill and gaze out at the unoccupied air space where Linda Thomas had once worked. Beyond it was a building that looked like an old Philco radio. A Philip Johnson building, they said. I raised my glass to it.
“Way to go, Phil,” I said. Lucky I hadn’t been assigned to guard it. Probably lose it. Was right here when I left it. My glass was empty. I got up and got the bottle and poured another drink and went back and sat and stared out the dark window. The dogs stood when I stood, sat back down when I did.
The light fused up from the street the way it does in a city and softened into a pinkish glow at the top of the darkened buildings. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the pills and powders and booze and self- delusion and bullshit had busted her, and she had simply run and was running now.
I looked at the pinkish glow some more. I had nowhere I needed to be, nothing I needed to do. Susan was shopping. What if Jill had gone home? To her mother. To the hovel in the middle of the putrid hot field in the back alley of Esmeralda. I called Lipsky. “Maybe she went to her mother’s,” I said.
“Esmeralda police checked,” Lipsky said. “No sign of her. Just the old lady, or what’s left of her.”
“You thought of it,” I said.
“Honest to God,” Lipsky said and hung up.
I drank a little more scotch. I had a feeling I might drink a lot more scotch. One of the dogs got up and went to the corner and drank from the bowl pf water I’d put down. He came back with water dripping from his muzzle and sat and resumed staring.
The phone rang. When I answered an accentless voice at the other end said, “This is Victor del Rio.”
“Hey,” I said. “Que pasa?”
“She is here,” del Rio said.
“In L.A.?” I said.
“Here, with me,” del Rio said. “I think you better come out and get her.”
Chapter 35
I HAD my ticket. I was packed: clean shirt, extra I blackjack. And I was having breakfast with Hawk and Susan, in the public atrium of the Charles Square complex in Cambridge.
“Jewish American Princesses,” Susan was saying, “particularly those with advanced academic degrees, do not baby-sit dogs.”
I looked at Hawk.
“That is even more true,” he said, “of African American Princes.”
The three mongrels, tethered by clothesline, sat in their pre-ordered circle, tongues lolling, eyes fixed on each morsel of croissant as it made its trip from paper plate to palate.
“Can you imagine them tearing around my place,” Susan said, “with all the geegaws and froufrous I have in there, getting hair, yuk, on my white rug?”
I was silent, drinking my coffee carefully from the large paper cup, holding it in both hands. Hawk broke off a piece of croissant, divided it into three morsels and gave one each to the dogs. They took it delicately, in each case, from his fingers and stayed in place, eyes alert, after a quick swallow, and a fast muzzle lick, tongues once again lolling.
“Put ‘em in a kennel,” Hawk said. “Till my friend in Bridgewater gets back.”
I looked at the three dogs. They gazed back at us, their eyes hazel with big dark pupils and full of more meaning than there probably was. They wern’t young dogs, and there was a stillness in them, perhaps of change and strangeness, that had been in place since I got them.
“I don’t think they should go in a kennel,” Susan said. “They’ve had some pretty bad disruptions in the last few days already.”
Hawk shrugged. He looked at the dogs again. “Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” he said.
We all sat in silence, drinking coffee, eating our croissants. A blond woman wearing exercise clothes under a fur coat passed us, carrying a tray with two muffins on it. The dogs all craned their heads over nearly backwards
